the scene celebrates itself
I’m happy that John Green is doing this Crash Course series on Navigating Digital Information. This is important and I look forward to all the episodes.
John recently gave up all social media for a year. Here’s his first-day video and here’s his one-month follow-up. In the
There’s been a bunch of activity in the label realm, so I thought I’d give a quick update on my 8D Industries imprint.
Terry Grant AKA More Ghost Than Man participated in Big Shot Magazine’s 2018 Rewind, answering a few questions about the past year and the present one. In response to a new year’s resolution, Terry quotes Gustave Flaubert:
“Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
(I also submitted to the 2018 Rewind if you’d like to check it out.)
More Ghost Than Man’s Everything Impossible Is Far Away album continues to fascinate, providing evocative instrumental soundscapes for your mind-movies. In 2019 Terry will release a long-gestating short sci-fi film using the album’s songs. Terry’s been dropping clues on Instagram — he’s built a city in his garage and created some sort of space-age sickbay.
We’ll be releasing the follow-up to Everything Impossible Is Far Away later this year.
Monta At Odds have been busy, building on the deserved hype for last year’s Argentum Dreams album and they just performed a bunch of New Order songs (as ‘Blue Monta’) at a special end-of-the-year concert. To keep the momentum going, we’re reissuing Monta’s 2005 debut album Unsuspecting. It’s currently out of print, and it shouldn’t be — it’s a terrific ride, and, though more on the ‘downtempo’ tip, isn’t that far off from the sound of Argentum Dreams. Two stand-out songs you can listen to now: “Disappointment” and “A Nick A Scratch A Scuff.”
Our reissue of Unsuspecting will be out on January 18. If you’re a Bandcamp user, follow 8D Industries there to receive a message once the album is available. Like all of our releases, it will be ‘name your price’ on the Bandcamp platform.
San Mateo delivered his just-completed album this week, and it’s fantastic. The cover art is stunning as well. I can’t wait to send this out into the world. Mid-April, perhaps? It’s the early stages of release planning — once Unsuspecting is out, I’ll have a better idea. In the meantime, dive into San Mateo’s previous work if you’re new to this expressive audio artist.
And an upcoming Q-Burns Abstract Message release? Stay tuned.
Micro-licensing sites — where you add your music to an online library portal and licensing rights are granted for a small fee — have an allure. For one thing, they’re convenient as you merely upload your songs and fill in some info. The only other step is to cross your fingers and hope your music takes off on the site. Micro-licensing sites promote royalty in scale — that if your music is successful, it won’t matter that the license fee is $15 (or whatever). Thousands of those will add up.
But it’s common knowledge that it’s a 1% of 1% that have such success on these sites. And I’d wager these successful composers work super-hard at it, doing quite a bit more than crossing fingers.
You also have to accept that, in most cases, you’re losing complete control of your work when you supply music to one of these content providers. You don’t know who’s licensing, and you certainly can’t deny a license, and you won’t be able to gauge or benefit from a commercial entity making loads of money off your work.
Stock photo sites operate the same. Which brings us to this story reported in Petapixel:
It turns out a Newfoundland-based company called Islandwide Distributors (IWD) had licensed [Michael] Stemm’s photo royalty-free from Shutterstock for just $1.88. The company then turned around and made at least 500,000 units of products with it [and sold the products in Walmart stores across Canada] — Stemm learned this number after reaching out to the company. So while Stemm’s experience may seem unfair, it was likely entirely lawful and within Islandwide’s rights.
The salt on the wound:
Unfortunately for Stemm, he isn’t even able to withdraw the $1.88 he earned, as his account needs to reach a balance of $50 before he can see the funds.
Techdirt has no sympathy for Stemm:
Stemm said Shutterstock could license the photo. Shutterstock did exactly that. The fact that Walmart has more than 500,000 items featuring Stemm’s photo is probably unexpected, but if you really want to retain full rights to your creation, you don’t hand part of those rights over to a middleman. When Walmart licensed the picture from Shutterstock, it didn’t seek Stemm’s permission because it didn’t need Stemm’s permission. […]
It certainly seems unfair when a company can make hundreds of dollars from a $1.88 license. But there’s nothing unfair about a process that involves a voluntary relinquishment of control. Shutterstock can certainly find a greater market for someone’s photos, but no one should go into this relationship believing it will result in newfound personal wealth.
I agree with Techdirt’s sentiment here — when you enter into an arrangement with a stock photo library, or a music library, or the record label that will own the rights to your songs, you need to accept what you’re getting into. Moving forward, any mistake is but a learning moment as you got yourself into the mess. According to Petapixel, even Stemm admits he didn’t read Shutterstock’s licensing terms before clicking ‘submit.’
That said, I do believe these sites could do a better job explaining what’s in store for content creators and to favor realistic expectations. The idea that an artist will make ‘easy money’ through a micro-licensing site supports a rare exception. The artist might have better luck buying lottery tickets. Just like the lottery, the allure is strong — I’ve certainly been tempted, by both these licensing libraries and the lottery. And it’s okay if you play — just understand the agreement that you’re entering, the potential outcomes, and how frustrating it is to be in Michael Stemm’s position.
I recently wrote about ‘Best Of’ lists and the practice of using them as a guide to finding acclaimed albums one might have missed over the past year. Since writing that post, I’ve decided that playing catch up on the previous year — which might take all year! — only ensures that I’m always catching up. I’ve started the year, as part of my ‘album a day’ routine, looking to the present with the goal of my own ‘Best Of’ or ‘F
But these end-of-year lists remain a fascinating study. They reveal trends, changing attitudes, and clues to where the mainstream is going.
Rob Mitchum has been aggregating many year-end charts to create a mother-of-all-lists. He’s been doing this since 2013 so comparing his results over the last five years is starting to reveal swings and transitions. This year is marked by diversity, increased critical acceptance of popular artists, and the lack of a clear breakout winner for the number one spot.
When asked about why there isn’t a breakout pick for best album of 2018, Mitchum pointed to a paradigmatic shift in music writing that’s led to better representation and coverage of music genres across the board, with more albums thus vying for preferential treatment. “Music writing has become a lot less indie rock-focused, and there’s a better diversity of music opinion, which levels the playing field a lot for albums …” he said. “You can see in 2013 already how critics have been broadening out to other genres. If I had started the project fifteen years ago, it’d be more apparent how music writing has changed.” […]
Mitchum stressed that it’s good for music when critics move towards a wider variety of genres, and more consideration of the popular and the mainstream. “There’s a lot of alarmist writing on algorithms and streaming, but data-driven music discovery can be good… and I guess that [my] project is another way of saying that,” he said.
These results also show how much the mainstream has changed in the past several years. The sound of popular music has been affected by unlimited access to emerging sounds and cross-pollination of genres that previously would have stayed in tight niches. There hasn’t been an obvious new musical movement or style since perhaps the ‘90s, but I’d argue that a lot of current popular music would sound downright experimental to someone listening ten or fifteen years ago. It’s good to see critics supporting this.
However, for a ‘Best Of’ list reality check here’s some straight talk from book publisher Anna Trubek from her always enlightening Notes from a Small Press newsletter:
… I feel a fool for falling for [Best Of] lists, which are really “favorite books read by critics, who must read the must buzzed-about books for their jobs, so much-buzzed-about books are a large percentage of the books they read, so they often end up on the Best of lists, which are really just their favorites, and a tiny percentage of the total number of books published in a year, and so these lists are all a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy.”
Via The New Yorker, last night I read this thought-provoking profile of Elizabeth Anderson, a philosopher of growing renown in that male-dominated field. She’s working to disconnect the inverse relationship between freedom and equality. That is, the idea that freedom is expanded at the expense of equality and vice versa. I never thought about the ‘left vs. right’ debate boiling down to that underlying assumption. From the article:
If individuals exercise freedoms, conservatives like to say, some inequalities will naturally result. Those on the left basically agree—and thus allow constraints on personal freedom in order to reduce inequality. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin called the opposition between equality and freedom an “intrinsic, irremovable element in human life.” It is our fate as a society, he believed, to haggle toward a balance between them. […]
The trouble was that many people, picking up on libertarian misconceptions, thought of freedom only in the frame of their own actions. If one person’s supposed freedom results in someone else’s subjugation, that is not actually a free society in action. It’s hierarchy in disguise.
The piece is a long one (Pocket estimates 38 minutes), but it’s worth the read, sometimes heady but entertaining throughout: The Philosopher Redefining Equality
On a side note, mid-way through the article there’s a New Yorker cartoon that’s the most bizarre one I’ve ever seen.
There’s an effort to make the entire Sun Ra catalog available online, and that’s no easy task. The inimitable jazz artist’s catalog is vast and perplexing, and previously unknown recordings are unearthed on a regular basis. Admittedly some of his work is impenetrable to the uninitiated, creating an impression that Sun Ra is a cacophonous weirdo. That would be a misunderstanding. Irwin Chusid, who is managing the reissue series via Sun Ra LLC, had this to say in an interview with Bandcamp Daily:
He is an institution. He is a cosmic force. He is a genius. He’s one of the great neglected composer-musicians of the 20th century. There’s no question what this man created is singular. There’s no one like Sun Ra. […]
I think 75 percent of Sun Ra’s sprawling catalogue is accessible … Is it slick? No. Is it smooth? No. Is it mainstream? No. But it’s fun. It’s musical. It’s engaging. It’s adventurous. It’s diverse. And a lot of it is jazz.
Diving into the catalog is daunting but rewarding, and it’s not difficult to find starting points. That Bandcamp Daily article suggests many good intro albums. This piece in Vulture has some excellent recommendations, too.
I’ve been going down the Sun Ra rabbit-hole, exploring the extensive catalog available on Bandcamp, and ran across the compilation Sun Ra Exotica. I do love the strange ‘50s genre of ‘exotica,’ exemplified by the likes of Martin Denny, Les Baxter, and Arthur Lyman. The style, in a way, is a precursor to what Jon Hassell coined ‘fourth world music:’ a blending of different traditional styles with Western music to create a previously unimagined sound.
I had never thought of Sun Ra in the context of ‘exotica,’ but it makes sense. He was, after all, an exotic dude. And his oeuvre is so expansive that contextualizing groupings of his compositions under a theme, like ‘exotica,’ reveals something new about Sun Ra’s work.
From the release notes to Sun Ra Exotica:
Was Exotica kitsch? Did it represent “cultural appropriation”? Was it a dilution of indigenous art? Who cares? Music should be enjoyed on its own terms. … Exotica has roots, but those roots are uncopyable. What emerges is something derivative, yet original. Here you have Sun Ra, of African-American extraction, influenced by Les Baxter, a Caucasian from Texas, who was in turn influenced by primitive jungle rites. It’s a cultural feedback loop, best enjoyed by leaving politics out of it.
Sun Ra Exotica is a terrific starting point for those unfamiliar with Sun Ra’s spaceways. It’s also a pleasure for this longtime fan, the 25 tracks fitting together effortlessly in Ra’s cosmic sonic puzzle. It’s the soundtrack for my weekend.
Vulture explores today’s topsy-turvy state of the album release strategy in an article that asks Does the Surprise Album Release Still Work? My answer: it can if the strategy fits your brand and fan expectations … and, as the article points
This quote from Beggars Group’s Matt Harmon in the article is important:
“Streaming means that we’re not getting the sales that we used to get the week of release or the first three or six months of release, but that those sales or streams or equivalent units are stretched over the first two, three, four, five years …”
Longterm thinking is increasingly vital and that’s a good thing. The first-week album splash might still work for the music industry’s 1%, but anyone else not actively promoting an album — and a body of work — continually for the entirety of his or her recording career is playing the wrong game. Streaming rewards maintaining interest in a back catalog. Take advantage of this and stop looking at a release date as the crest of your promotional efforts.
I’ve done some work with Toni Tennille, helping with the promotion and management of her memoir as well as some general consultancy and publishing guidance. I did have a previous connection: Toni is Caroline’s aunt, which makes Daryl Dragon (‘The Captain’) her uncle. And, technically, my uncle (or uncle-in-law).
I never met Daryl but had an email exchange with him several years ago. He was curious about the status of some C&T compositions and wanted help investigating publishing and master rights, with the hope of exploiting selections from the catalog. Daryl sent me this detailed email — one of the most meticulous I have ever received. He listed all of the songs in question — dozens — separated by genre, style, and era, with codes designating where each was released, if it was a
Also, The Captain started one of his emails to me with “Ahoy, Michael!” That was pretty cool.
One thing that I always found fascinating about Captain & Tennille is that they owned their publishing from the beginning. It is rare for songwriters signing with major labels to keep their publishing rights, and even rarer to do this in the early ‘70s. Another bold move was Daryl’s decision to open a recording studio, Rumbo Recorders, in 1979. Whatever preconceptions you might have about Captain & Tennille know that Daryl and Toni had the foresight and an independent spirit that eludes many ‘superstar’ artists.
Daryl Dragon passed away yesterday at the age of 76. Toni was with him and, though their relationship was troubled and they divorced, the two remained close. It was sweet how encouraging and at ease Daryl was with Toni’s memoir, which some found explosive in how it addressed their personal history. Right before the book came out, I was in a car with Toni and ‘The Captain’ called. Toni put him on speakerphone, and it was fun to hear their interaction, two close friends catching up.
Toni once told me that Daryl had a massive love for music technology and synthesizers. She said that if he could just play around with synthesizers all day, then he’d be happy. So, in tribute, I’m posting this video from the 1978 TV special Captain & Tennille in Hawaii. I think it shows Daryl Dragon truly in his element.
P.S. I bet you didn’t know that Daryl (and his brothers) have a rad psych album out on Ninjatune.
There’s a misconception that sampling has a time limit, that one can legally sample anything (a drum hit, a vocal yelp, a guitar riff) as long as it’s short. I’ve heard various guidelines set for this assumption with the two-second mark as the most common. It’s not true. If a judge or jury can identify a sound — any sound — as originating from a copyrighted source, you’re probably in trouble.
Granted, the US courts have not been consistent in how they rule on this, and it’s fair to say there’s no set precedent here. But, in the EU, this may no longer be the case thanks to repeatedly snubbed Rock-and-Roll-Hall-of-Famers Kraftwerk and the synthesized sound of banging metal.
via Billboard:
The case involves a two-second sample from “Metall
auf Metall,” which the producers Moses Pelham and Martin Haas used as a continuous background loop in the 1997 song “Nur Mir.” Although the sample consists of just two seconds of the original song, it’s recognizable and important in “Nur Mir,” which is performed by the singer Sabrina Setlur. […]
… Advocate General Maciej Szpunar advised the European Court of Justice, which is deciding a copyright case that involves Kraftwerk’s “Metall of Metall,” that even limited sampling of a recording can constitute copyright infringement. Advocate General opinions are not binding, but they’re watchedclosely, since they often predict the way the high court of Europe will decide cases.
The case is interesting as it involves only the recording (master) side of the music and not the composition (written song). The idea is that one can take a ‘sample’ of a written song in isolation — such as a
Basically, when you sample a two second clip of a track, you are sampling both the recording and the song contained within it. But it might be hard to argue that the two second snippet of the song can be protected by copyright in isolation. However, at the same time you could argue that the two second snippet of the recording is.
The ‘Metal On Metal’ case centres on the recording rights. In essence, in the 2012 court hearing, when one argument on the Kraftwerk side was that Pelham could have recreated the sounds he sampled, they were basically saying that there was no song copyright to infringe here, but that the separate recording copyright had been infringed by the uncleared sample.
In his ruling, the Advocate General wrote, “A phonogram is not an intellectual creation consisting of a composition of elements such as words, sounds,
Some of the questions referred to the European Court of Justice involve details of European law, including whether the German concept of free use is compatible with EU law. But others get to the center of the debate around copyright and free expression. Generally, most countries’ courts have held that quotation doesn’t infringe copyright when a new work refers to the original one – in a book review, or even in a parody of a song. But what about when the new work has nothing to do with the original? Such questions have increased urgency in the digital age, and this is one of several important cases on the topic.
I wonder if this will create more consistency in how the courts rule on ‘short sample’ cases in the US. And I also wonder if New Order ever had to pony up for their own short Kraftwerk sample in “Blue Monday.”